This crosslinguistic study employs Tirkkonen-Condit's method of textual description (1985), for the scrutiny of two comparable corpora of American English and Peninsular Spanish leading persuasive newspaper articles, in order to assess through their proportional use of superordinate and ancillary rhetorical roles, the kind of writer-reader relationship they want to establish. The present study attempts to demonstrate that in persuasive journalistic writing, the proportion in the use of superordinate and ancillary rhetorical roles, or nuclei and satellites, adopting the terminology proposed by Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), is a viable indicator to assess what kind of relationship the writer sets out to establish with his/her readership. This study employs Tirkkonen-Condit's method of textual description (1985), for the scrutiny of two comparable corpora of American English and Peninsular Spanish leading newspaper articles. Rhetorical relations holding between sentences of each text and text spans were spelled out and then categorised as nuclei and satellites. Findings reveal a tendency for the American English editorials analyzed to be more writer-responsible than Peninsular Spanish ones. In other words, while in American English leading articles the reader's belief, comprehension or adherence to the thesis presented is not taken for granted, hence the need, on the part of the writer, to justify, explain, exemplify and reformulate; in Peninsular Spanish leading articles, a minor presence of ancillary rhetorical relations is understood as an illustration of less audience-sensitive writing. Data are discussed in relation to the respective socio-cultural contexts in which sample texts were written. Related articles Compliment responses among British and Spani… Journal of Pragmatics L2 pragmatic development in study abroad: A … Journal of Pragmatics Responses to failed humor Journal of Pragmatics Complaints online: The case of TripAdvisor Journal of Pragmatics Social distance and speech behavior: The cas… Journal of Pragmatics View more related articles Add appsHelp View Record in Scopus